Decoding Job Posting Language: Skills You Need, How to Develop Them, How to Demonstrate Them

Employers want job candidates who have the knowhow – technical skills and content knowledge – to do the jobs they need to fill. But they also seek people who have developed soft skills in leadership, problem solving, communication, teamwork, critical thinking and other less well-defined areas.

Employers want employees with these skills, outgrowths of personal habits and personality traits, because they shape how effectively a person interacts with others and gets things done.

“Some of these soft skills are timeless,” said University of Arkansas career counselor George Winter. “Employers want people who have the ability to work on teams and the ability to take initiative.”

The Offices of Career Connections at the U of A helps students understand how to develop these skills through coursework, employment and other activities. Additionally, the career counselors help students reflect on their previous experiences that have helped them build these skills and learn how to articulate them to prospective employers. A primary mission of Career Connections is to match skills needed for career success with curricular and co-curricular activities and student roles.

Winter knows something about being successful in your job. He has led students at the U of A in career exploration for 39 years. He has seen a lot of change in those years as a career counselor, but he said skills such as communication, leadership and critical thinking have always been in great demand. Technical skills are also valued but the technology itself changes rapidly, he said.

Soft Skills

Employers typically are reluctant to hire employees who have yet to learn the soft skills, he said, in part because teaching soft skills takes a lot of time. Employers would much rather hire employees that already have well developed soft skills.  

“It’s a lot harder and takes a lot more time to teach the soft skills than the hard skills,” Winter said. “If I want someone to learn how to use Excel, they can take a short course and have a pretty good basis on how to use it, but if I want someone to work on teams and they are not a good team player, good luck trying to teach that. It’s something we learn in the sandbox; if I don’t share my toys, people won’t be happy with me. After a while we start to develop those skills.”

Students writing resumes and preparing for interviews need to think about their experiences both in and out of the classroom to distill what fits into a job posting’s requirements and how to articulate that into their resume or interview preparation, he said.

“Someone who worked at McDonald’s as a member of a five-person team serving up to 100 customers per four-hour shift can use that as an example of how to work on a team, how to work under pressure, how to develop good interactions with that many customers,” he said. “What happens is someone will say, ‘I just worked in fast food.’ If that’s all you can say in an interview, the employer will say you haven’t developed a lot, but if you think about your experience, you learned a lot from the most ordinary things. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

Gaining Skills

Students will continue to build these skills while taking classes and through other experiences available to them, Winter said. They can gain leadership, collaboration and presentation skills by working on a group project for a class or joining a registered student organization. Students who are already working professionals can sharpen their skills by taking on similar leadership roles at work, he said.

The Career Connections website also gives suggestions on ways to gain these skills, many of which can be done online. They include taking online courses from sources such as LinkedIn Learning to which U of A students have free access, using classroom opportunities to build these skills and joining clubs and forums such as HogSync to gain experience putting these skills to use.

HogSync is the University of Arkansas’ online student involvement platform, connecting students with campus organizations, events and other opportunities to get involved, including some activities that are offered virtually or in hybrid formats.

Interviewing Confidently

“It’s equally as important to be able to talk during the interview process about these skills,” he said. “When I work with students on their resume, I tell them to write about their skills exactly as they would talk about them in an interview. Think about how they are going to say this in a conversation.”

Winter reminds students, while they may not have had many formal interviews, they have had thousands of conversations in their lives. He advises them to think about the interview as a conversation. The key is to describe how you have demonstrated these skills, rather than just say you have them. He also advises students to ask for clarification during an interview any time they are confused.

Because an interview is a new experience, the brain sees it as a threat and the body may feel the flight or fight response kick in, Winter said. Reframing it as a conversation changes the dynamic, makes it more comfortable, he said.

National Survey

Career Connections uses information provided by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which surveys employer members annually about what qualities they are looking for in job candidates.

“We are communicating with employers; we’re not guessing,” Winter said. “What I tell students is that one of the most important skills you have by getting a degree is showing an employer that you have the ability to learn how to learn. Things change so rapidly and you have to adapt and learn, adapt to specifically what an employer wants.”

Specifically, when asked what attributes they are looking for on resumes, nearly 90% of employers responding to NACE’s Job Outlook 2025 survey indicated they are seeking evidence of a student’s ability to solve problems and nearly 80% are seeking candidates who have strong teamwork skills.

Each year, the NACE survey asks about hiring plans and other employment-related issues to project the market for new college graduates from the current class and to assess a variety of conditions that may influence that market.

Written communication skills, initiative, strong work ethic, and technical skills are important to at least 70% of responding employers.

In addition, more than two-thirds seek verbal communication skills, flexibility/adaptability and analytical/quantitative skills in the candidates they recruit.

Learn More

The Offices of Career Connections offers career education services, such as career coaching, tips for developing a professional reputation and interviewing for new opportunities, assistance with application materials, events, resources to practice networking, career exploration, and search strategies, to name a few. Appointments can be found on Handshake.

 

What Employers Want

The Career Connections website includes a breakdown of many of the terms you’ll see in job postings. These skills, identified by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, encompass a wide array of competencies essential for professional success. Career Connections offers a description, sample behaviors and ways to develop these skills:

Career and Self-development	Employers expect employees to have self-awareness and continuously grow professionally by being aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, navigating career opportunities and networking to build relationships with others.
Communication	No matter your technical capabilities, employers expect you to be able to share your ideas and perspectives in a variety of ways.
Critical Thinking	Employers rely on you to problem-solve. While they want you to be curious and ask questions, they also want to know you can critically think through situations and data on your own to determine next steps.
Leadership	No matter what your job title is, everyone wants to work with people who can inspire, persuade and motivate people to use their strengths to achieve a common goal.
Perspective Awareness	Employers want to know that you can work with people outside your own discipline and with people who have different life experiences than you. They want you to be able to collaborate with others and create environments in which everyone can contribute fully.
Professionalism	Employers want to be able to rely on you. They want to know you’ll be on time, get the job done and that you’ll do it with integrity.
Teamwork	Employers want to hire people who can work well with others and play different roles, depending on the situation. They want you to lead when the situation calls for it and be a team player when others lead.
Technology	Employers want you to be familiar with the technology applications that they use daily. More importantly, they want to know you can learn and use new technologies ethically because this means you can do it again and again as new technologies emerge.

Source: https://career.uark.edu/students/competencies/skills.php 

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